CHAPTER 21: The Twenti-first Fracture

The tournament had been officially canceled.

Word spread quietly.

The academy fell into a hush of reverence.

No one dared speak of points or brackets anymore.

Arkai’s death had fractured more than the arena.

It cracked the illusion that this place—this realm—was ever truly under control.

I was granted permission to hold a proper burial for my twin brother, outside the confines of the academy.

I chose a hill not far from its walls. Close enough to protect. Far enough to mourn.

A place no harm would ever reach again.

The day of the burial was gray.

Not from clouds.

From something deeper.

I stood in silence, staring down at his body in the coffin.

Not as a warrior.

Not as a manipulator of scalars.

Just a brother.

The others stood back—Principal Lyra, Yuuka, even Alric.

Only Saaya stood close beside me.

She didn’t speak.

But her presence… it anchored me.

I stepped forward, placing my hand over Arkai’s chest—where the glyph once pulsed.

My fingers trembled.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“I should’ve saved you.

If I had only known you were here from the start…”

My voice broke. I didn’t hide it.

Saaya stepped beside me, her hand resting gently over mine.

“You tried,” she whispered. “And you loved him. That matters more than you think.”

I closed my eyes.

Around us, a faint circle of light formed.

Our glyphs—mine and Arkai’s—interwoven in a final shimmer.

Blue and red, softly blending into violet.

Then, like ash in the wind, the light scattered.

He was gone.

We buried him beneath the altar.

Wrapped in cloth.

Surrounded by the broken shards of his glyph stones.

When the final stone was placed, I didn’t move.

And Saaya stayed.

That night, I returned to the sanctum beneath the academy.

The Grid was still quiet.

I didn’t eat.

Didn’t sleep.

The pain hadn’t dulled.

I thought it would.

But each thought of him brought another quiet collapse inside me.

The vow to avenge him lived on.

But it was tangled in sorrow.

Days passed.

Saaya visited every day.

Sometimes she sat beside me, saying nothing.

Sometimes she brushed her fingers through my hair.

Sometimes she held me when the silence became too loud.

Then one night, I broke.

Crushed by everything I’d tried to keep buried.

She found me crumpled on the floor, fists clenched, breath shallow.

She knelt behind me.

Wrapped her arms around my shoulders.

Laid her forehead gently against my back.

“Let it out,” she whispered.

“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

For the first time in days, I turned and cried into her arms.

She didn’t let go.

On the third day after the burial, Yuuka came.

I sensed her before I saw her.

Something in the air shifted.

The pressure bent.

She stepped into the sanctum alone.

Hair tied back. Jacket over her shoulder.

Eyes calm. Focused.

But behind them… a flicker.

Like something else was watching with her.

“I figured you’d be here,” she said.

She walked past me and stopped at the center of the room.

“Arkai’s glyph… it left something in you, didn’t it?”

I blinked.

“…How do you know that?”

Yuuka tilted her head. And then—

Something shifted.

Her voice dropped. Her gaze hardened.

Not hostile. Not cruel.

Just colder.

“She knows,” another voice said through her lips, “because I let her.

And because you’ll need me to survive what comes next.”

I stood, startled.

“Who are you?”

She smirked.

But it wasn’t Yuuka’s smile.

“I’m her other half. The only one who can teach you how to master what’s waking up inside you.”

Behind me, my glyph flickered to life—

Violet now.

Red and blue colliding in unstable, beautiful chaos.

Yuuka’s second self raised a hand.

And the room bent.

Reality folded.

And in an instant—

We vanished

There was no wind.

No light.

No direction.

When I opened my eyes, I saw… nothing.

A nothingness so profound it swallowed every sense.

The Grid was gone.

No pulses. No rules. No laws of motion humming beneath my skin.

For the first time since awakening to my scalar abilities, I felt naked. Untethered.

Not weakened—just… falling.

Falling inside something vast and uncaring.

“Don’t be afraid.”

Yuuka’s voice echoed across nothing—not from a distance, but from everywhere.

She stood—or floated—before me. Or maybe above me.

The Void didn’t allow for up or down. It just… was.

“This place is beyond the Scalar Grid,” she said.

“A realm that transcends the infinite fractures connected to it.

The gods who rule the realms you’ve seen?

They’ve never set foot here. They don’t even know it exists.”

I tried to speak, but no sound came. My throat moved. Nothing followed.

She raised a hand.

Suddenly, I heard her inside my mind.

“Now you can speak.”

I gasped, staggering slightly. Even that motion warped the space around me, sending ripples of violet fractals across the dark.

“Where… are we?” I asked. “Is this a fracture?”

Yuuka pulsed—then split.

A shimmer of energy unfolded her into two forms.

One, the girl I knew—soft-eyed, calm, mysterious.

The other… taller. Radiant with pressure that felt less like light and more like inevitability.

Eyes burned with white flame. Glyphs orbited her in slow, predatory spirals.

Her second self spoke.

“We transcend all fractures. We are beyond laws. Beyond time.”

“This is the boundary where Scalar Law begins,” said the first.

“And where it eventually breaks.”

I stood still, letting the words settle like gravity.

“I brought you here,” the radiant self said,

“because Set cannot be fought with the tools you know.

What’s inside you—Arkai’s glyph, your evolving resonance—it needs to grow outside the system that caged it.”

She raised her hand.

The Void rippled.

Symbols appeared—rings within rings of dimensional glyphs, spiraling forever.

I recognized echoes of glyphs I’d seen when I clashed with Set.

But these weren’t broken. These were whole. Uncompromised.

Yuuka raised her hand again.

A sphere ignited. Not light—structure.

Living glyphs rotated around each other in maddening, rhythmic patterns.

Some flickered with heat. Others with weight.

I felt time bend just by standing near it.

“You need to learn how to rewrite the divine laws that govern the world below us,” she said.

“That’s the main reason I’m here.”

Her tone shifted slightly—colder. Not unkind. Just stripped of softness.

“I’ve been watching you.

And I’ve noticed something: you default to gravity in almost every battle.

Even when you don’t mean to.

You don’t control it. You lean into it.”

Her eyes gleamed.

“That’s not a weakness. That’s a key.”

“I’m going to teach you how to use your scalar field—your gravity—to rewrite the divine laws of the Lower World.”

I looked at her—the divine version. The one who didn’t blink.

“Why?” I asked. “Why go so far to help me?

You said it yourself—you’ve been watching for a while.

But why?”

Yuuka didn’t answer immediately.

Behind her, the sphere pulsed. One glyph glitched—twisting slightly out of rhythm.

“I’m helping you,” she said slowly,

“because if you succeed… the Five Gods might learn how to transcend the Grid.

And if they come here—”

She paused. Her next words dropped like blades.

“—nothing will stop them.”

She exhaled.

“They’ve been observing you since the moment you arrived.

They even sent an assassin. Not just to kill you—

but to understand what you are.”

A flicker passed over her face. Brief.

Her human self hesitated. But her divine self smiled.

Cold. Small. Almost amused.

“They don’t fear you yet,” she added. “But they will.”

The silence that followed didn’t feel peaceful.

It felt held back. Like something deeper was waiting to speak.

And I stood there, breath thin, realizing—

I was never just being hunted.

I was being studied. Like an error in their code.

Yuuka’s divine self clapped once.

“Let’s start the training. More questions can be asked later.”

“Alright,” I said.

Yuuka turned, her divine half trailing sparks of forgotten timelines with every movement. The air—or what passed for it—shifted with meaning, not motion.

She reached out and touched the sphere of glyphs. It reacted instantly, collapsing inward into a spiral of shapes I couldn’t name. Not yet.

“This is the first lesson,” she said. “Not power. Not control. Recognition.”

I stepped forward, and something inside me responded—not in the way my field usually flared, but deeper. Lower. A hum in my bones. A voice made of resonance. It wasn’t mine.

It was Arkai’s.

Faint. Echoing. But alive.

Yuuka’s gaze sharpened.

“You feel it,” she said. “His glyph—his final imprint—wasn’t just power. It was understanding. Symmetry between the soul and the world.”

The space between us distorted, and suddenly the void birthed a single floating symbol: Arkai’s glyph. Fully formed. Burning with red, but laced now with threads of violet—the color of my evolving resonance.

“He didn’t use scalars the way you do,” Yuuka said.

“He didn’t bend gravity. He bent meaning. Made cause and effect align with his will.”

I stared at the glyph. It pulsed—once with memory, once with pain.

“How did he do that?” I asked. “How do you rewrite laws when you’re bound by them?”

Yuuka’s answer was almost a whisper.

“You don’t fight the law.”

She stepped toward me.

“You become the context it exists within.”

The space shattered—then reformed.

Around us now were layers—fractals of past battles, each frozen in suspended time. I saw Arkai lifting his hand in a training ground. I saw myself, bleeding under Set’s foot. I saw Saaya screaming across collapsing stone.

All moments where we resisted the laws of the world.

Yuuka continued.

“Scalar energy is not just manipulation. It’s intent. Gravity is the law your soul clings to. Arkai’s glyph was structure. Yours is force. Together, they form the first equation.”

The glyph split in two.

One glowed violet, raw and unstable—mine.

The other, red, solid and harmonic—Arkai’s.

“They repel each other now,” she said. “Because you haven’t accepted what his death gave you.”

I stepped closer. The glyphs shook, resisting convergence.

“What do I do?” I asked.

Yuuka didn’t answer. She vanished. Or maybe she folded.

The space around me trembled. And then I was back in that moment—the one where Arkai died.

Set’s blade. Arkai’s hand reaching for mine. The light leaving his eyes.

Except this time, I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I listened.

“You always tried to protect me,” Arkai whispered in the memory. “But now it’s your turn to reshape the story.”

I opened my eyes.

The glyphs hovered in front of me again.

This time, I didn’t reach with force.

I reached with understanding.

With grief.

With bond.

And slowly… they aligned.

Not fully. Not yet.

But the resistance stopped.

The glyphs hovered side by side—two halves of a rewritten law waiting to be written.

Behind me, Yuuka’s voice echoed again. Both of her. Human and god.

“This is only the beginning.”

“Next, you’ll learn to make those laws obey you.”

The void pulsed.

And my training truly began.